How to destroy a human being

In 2004 a series of images seeped out into the world’s media that seemed to emerge from the pit of hell itself. Abu Ghraib prison had been known, under the rule of Saddam Hussein, as the closed door behind which the very worst of his terrors was carried out. By now in the hands of the conquering US military, it was evident that the means and methods of prisoner treatment had not significantly changed. The pictures revealed that a programme of torture, rape, abuse and humiliation was part of the experience of daily life at Abu Ghraib under US control.
It is the unselfconsciousness of the images that is perhaps what is so disturbing about them. They look like a series of holiday snaps – the toothy grins and thumbs-up gestures of the US guards point to the camaraderie they were evidently feeling in their shared experience. They seem utterly detached from the prisoners whom, by complete contrast, lie prone and passive or cringe in terror. They recoil from the lunges of dogs. They stand masturbating while a female guard watches and points. They lie in naked pyramids of flesh. They hang by their chained wrists from the bars of their cells. In one image, a hooded Iraqi prisoner stands elevated on a box with his arms outstretched. His fingers are attached by metal clips to wires. He is clearly under the impression that the wires are electrified, and that he is about to experience extreme pain and possibly death.

Torture is usually the most secret of acts, usually concealed from the world by the thickness of prison walls. Torturers do not like to put their work on their public record. Though posing the prisoners for photographs as if they were some tourist attraction seemed to be part of the torture itself, it was also a naïve mistake. It revealed what was meant to be kept hidden. Here finally we could catch a glimpse of the torturers craft from the inside. It made the world witnesses to their work, and led to the shame and imprisonment of the perpetrators – if not those who ordered them to carry out a ‘hard’ interrogation.

There was also in the revelation of the photographs in the western media the shocking realisation that the torturers were not operating at the behest of a Saddam or a Mugabe or a Pinochet, but were the representatives of a modern, liberal western democracy. The self-image of westerners as enlightened and reasonable people was shattered. In fact, democracies have not ever ceased to deploy torture as a method. In his book Torture and Democray, US-Iranian political scientist Darius Rejali shows how even modern democracies have used torture – those regimes that describe themselves as humane and supportive of human rights. The terrible secret at the heart of democratic regimes is that even in the name of humanity we led to destroy the human – an act that is ultimately self-destructive. As the Vatican foreign minister Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo said: ‘The torture? A more serious blow to the United States than September 11, 2001 attacks. Except that the blow was not inflicted by terrorists but by Americans against themselves.’ Attempts to isolate the prison guards Lynndie England and Charles Graner from the military hierarchy and to depict them as uneducated and Southern were a predictable response from the media and the judiciary to the possibility of a general complicity in the acts that were depicted in the photographs.

As the Abu Ghraib photographs reveal, in torture bodily pain is only one aspect of the process and interrogation for information is only one of the goals. In fact, torture involves the deconstruction and dismemberment of the human person – which is both its overriding purpose and its means. In his remarkable book Torture and Eucharist US theologian Cavanaugh cites the case study of Arturo, a torture victim of the Pinochet regime in Chile. Arturo told his therapist: ‘I feel as though I were not myself’ (p. 41).

Thus, in torture we can observe in a chilling way a kind of negative anthropology: the torturer has to tacitly acknowledge what a human being is, in order to pull him apart. Evil speaks a kind of truth - in order to undo it, it has to acknowledge it. In torture we have a perverse revelation of the human in the attempt to make her disappear. The horror of torture shows us how vulnerable a human is, too: that our bodily life places us in the path of circumstances that may separate us from ourselves.